Prune Your Dialogue

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By Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
By Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
“Dialogue is like a rose bush – it often improves after pruning. I recommend you rewrite your dialogue until it is as brief as you can get it. This will mean making it quite unrealistically to the point. That is fine. Your readers don’t want realistic speech, they want talk which spins the story along.”  Nigel Watts

I challenge you to pull out a scene of dialogue and really look at it closely. Then cut it, cut it, and cut it again.

Try these three simple methods:

Remove the fluff and filler – Highlight the words that are critical to the plot or character. Keep the words that tie those critical words together and try to get rid of most of the rest.

Forget complete sentences – Few of us talk in complete sentences, so don’t expect your characters to do it. Try writing the dialogue without a complete sentence. Your dialogue will speed up and sound more natural.

Change the voice – Each of your characters should sound different. Some will be succinct, some verbose. Some will have a “young” vocabulary and others sound “old.”

Good luck pruning your dialogue. Don’t be afraid to chop too much. Unlike rose bushes, dialogue can grow back almost immediately.